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Early Protestant Reformation
The '''Early Protestant Reformation' lasted from about 1517 AD until 1547 AD. It began with the publication of the Ninety-five Theses by Martin Luthar in 1517. It then ended with the reign of Henry VIII, whose disagreement with the Pope on the question of an annulment, led almost by accident to the English Reformation. The demand for renewal within the Catholic Church and to rediscover a simpler, more authentic version of the Christian life, was something in the air at the beginning of the 16th-century, spurred by earlier reformers such as John Wycliffe and Jan Hus. All it was waiting for was the man and occasion that would make them into a religious revolution. Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk, deeply read in theology, and somewhat tormented in spirit. He came to reject several teachings and practices of the Church; in particular the sale of Indulgences, and arguing for the holy text to be translated into every language to bring the Gospel truth closer to ordinary people. Luther's refusal to renounce all of his writings, resulted in his excommunication by the Pope and condemnation as an outlaw by the Holy Roman Emperor. Yet, through the revolutionary potential of the printing press, Luther's ideas spread throughout Europe within two months, sparking an unparalleled conflagration that shook Christendom for more than a century, with far-reaching religious, political, economic, and social consequences. The Protestant Reformation diversified almost immediately, and other reformers arose independently of Luther such as Zwingli and Calvin. Yet none of these provoked the first major rejection of Papal authority by a nation-state. In England a unique religious change arose almost by accident. Henry VIII, the second king of the Tudor line, became entangled with the Papacy over his wish to annul the first of his six marriages in order to get an heir. This led to one of the most remarkable assertions of secular authority in the whole 16th-century; one fraught with significance for England’s future. With the support of his obedient parliament, Henry VIII proclaimed himself Head of the Protestant Church in England. The Catholic Church was slow to respond to the Reformation, and the internal problems that had triggered it. But reinforced by the Counter-Reformation, the Papacy was soon well-placed to confront the challenge, providing standards to which Catholic rulers would rally. The whole of Europe Whole became embroiled in the growing religious fissure, with England, Scotland, Scandinavia, and the Dutch Netherlands identifying as Protestant, and Spain and Italy remaining staunchly Catholic. The situation was even more complicated in Switzerland, France, imperial Germany, and Ireland. Perhaps these were good years only for the Ottoman Turks. Venice watched her empire in the eastern Mediterranean crumble away. Charles V Habsburg, perhaps the most powerful rulers in Europe since Charlemagne, abdicated in frustration at the end of his reign; much of his inheritance in Hungary had been lost to the Turks, who at one point besieged Vienna itself; his rivalry with Francis I of France had resulted in little more than the illusion of dominating Italy; and the Reformation had ended forever the religious and political unity of the Holy Roman Empire. In his last years, Charles V was crippled by debt, despite a seemingly endless flow of treasure from the Americas, after the discovery and destruction of the Inca and Aztec civilisations. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Turkish war machine rolled on. At its peak under Suleiman the Magnificent, the empire encompassed the Balkans, Anatolia, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Arabia, Egypt, and north Africa. A new balance of power also emerged in the Mediterranean, with the Ottomans and Spain each dominating their respective halves, gradually reducing the Italian naval powers to irrelevant. Suleiman was a reformer as well as a conqueror, who turned his vast empire into a just and well-administered domain. At the time of his death in 1566, the Ottoman Empire was one of the foremost powers in the world, but tough times lay ahead. History The Reformation In the early-16th-century, an unparalleled conflagration shook western Christianity, that destroyed forever the old medieval unity of the faith, and had far-reaching religious, political, and social effects; the Protestant Reformation (1517-1645). In the half-light of a dawning modernity the deepest determinant of all men's lives was still the Catholic Church. The local parish priest was there for every pivotal moment in a person's life; baptizing them, marrying them, hearing their confessions, and providing last rites. Laymen set the pattern of their day to the bell of the parish church, monastery, or cathedral calling the more faithful to prayer every three hours. When the harvest was in, the Church blessed it. The Church provided all of the social services, from distributing alms to the poor, to running orphanages, and providing what little education was available. And the Church owned around one-third of all the land in Europe. Many factors contributed to a marked decline in morality and discipline within the Church during the 14th and 15th centuries. The Black Death hit clergymen especially severely, contracting the disease while tending to the sick and dying. These losses were eventually replaced by hastily trained and inexperienced men, often lacking the rigor of their predecessors. Moreover, in the wake of the Great Papal Schism, the Papacy.struggled in vain to recover the authority and dignity it had lost. If anything, the Italian Renaissance made ill-discipline and corruption within the Church worse, as Popes indulged in transforming Rome into the most opulent court in Europe. The scurrilous and worldly reputation of the Renaissance Popes began with the election of Sixtus IV (1471-84), who had the effrontery to sell indulgences, as a new revenue stream to fund the construction of the Sistine Chapel; indulgences were a promise of a shorter stay in purgatory for guilty sinners in return for a price, having evolved from practices commonly used during the Crusading Age. Sixtus also brought nepotism within the Church to new heights. His nephew Julius II (1503-1513) later became Pope, and introduced the new round of indulgences that so incensed Martin Luther, in order to help rebuild the splendid St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Moreover, fired by territorial ambitions, he shocked contemporaries by personally leading an army in battle. Between these two came the most notorious of all the Renaissance Popes, Alexander VI (1492-1503) of the Borgia family, who manipulated Italian politics to gain advantage for his family, and fathered as many as seven illegitimate children, three while serving as Pope. The wish to rediscover a simpler and more authentic version of the Christian life was characteristic of many new movements within Christianity long before Martin Luther. One was the commitment to poverty of the Franciscan Order, and another was a new intensity in the study of early Christian texts, paralleling the work of humanist scholars in the Renaissance. But the Englishman John Wycliffe (d. 1384) introduced so many of the major themes of the Reformation that he is usually seen as the main precursor of this greatest of all upheavals in Christian history. As a priest and professor at Oxford, Wycliffe's extensive writing took many controversial lines. He argued that the Church had no proper role in secular matters, attacked the privileged status of the clergy and the pomp of their ceremonies, denied that the Communion bread and wine was literally the body and blood of Christ, and disapproved of clerical celibacy, pilgrimages, saint relics, indulgences, and even the very existence of Papal authority. Most provocative of all, he maintained that all a Christian needed was the example of the Bible, which readers should be able to read in their own language; most people would only meet one person in their lives who had read the Bible, which was only available in Latin - their parish priest. Wycliffe and his associates completed a translation of both the New and Old Testament into Middle English by 1395. Since the printing press had not yet been invented, there existed only a very few copies of the Wycliffe Bible, and it was generally ignored by later English Protestant biblical translators, as it had been translated from the Latin rather than the original Greek and Hebrew. Wycliffe was of course condemned by the Church, but, in the midst of the Great Papal Schism, the two rival Popes had more pressing matters than a English heretic. Wyclif was a thinker rather than a man of action, but his works were a powerful influence on another reformer, Jan Hus (d. 1415), who fermented powerful unrest among his followers. For ten heady years, he preached sermons at Bethlehem chapel in Prague, speaking in his native Czech language, and arguing for a Christianity of piety, poverty and humility, very different from the worldly grandeur of the Papacy. As a prominent voice of Church reform, Hus was invited to the Council of Constance (1414-17) to put his case; the same council that ended the Great Papal Schism. The invitation posed obvious personal danger to Hus, but he was reassured by a promise of safe-conduct from the Holy Roman Emperor. The council rapidly condemned Jan Hus as a heretic, and burned him at the stake, with the emperor's tacit approval. When news Hus' martyrdom reached Prague, the movement for reform was greatly strengthened. His ideas spread throughout Bohemia (modern-day Czechia and Slovakia), fuelled by a nationalist wave of anti-German sentiment, and soon the whole country was in open revolt; the Hussite Wars (1419-1434). Under the brilliant leadership of Jan Želivský (1422), the Hussites captured Prague itself in 1419, during which they tossed several Catholic officials out the Town Hall's windows to their deaths; thus introducing the word "defenestration" into the political lexicon. The Hussites then defeated a series of Crusades proclaimed against them by the Pope and emperor, becoming notable for their extensive use of early hand-held firearms. Finally in 1434, the Hussites agreed to submit, having wrung major concessions from the Papacy, that allowed them to practice their somewhat idiosyncratic rites under a semi-independent locally elected archbishop; effectively a national church. The religious wars nevertheless weakened Bohemia to the point that it eventually came to be dominated by the Habsburgs. There had also appeared in the fifteenth century another subversive current in religious life; the humanistic, rational, sceptical intellectual movement which, for want of a better word, we may call Erasmian after the Dutchman who embodied its ideals most clearly in the eyes of contemporaries. Desiderius Erasmus (d. 1536) was profoundly loyal to his faith, and, though he did not challenge the authority of the Catholic Church or Papacy, in a subtler way he challenged authority in principle. He sought a simpler purer devotion, was critical of clerical abuses, and had an ideal of that Church that envisioned reform. In his Greek New Testament, he was also an exposer of the spuriousness of texts upon which Church dogma had been raised. Yet he always remained a good Catholics, and as the Protestant Reformation gathered momentum in his old age, he emphasised a middle way. The demand for reforming the Church was something in the air at the beginning of the 16th-century, waiting for the man and occasion which would make them into a religious revolution. No other term is adequate to describe what followed the unwitting act of an obscure German monk. Martin Luther '(d. 1546) lived all his life in the tiny German town of Wittenberg on the Elbe, almost at the back of beyond. He was an Augustinian monk, deeply read in theology, and somewhat tormented in spirit. At age 27, Luther was given the opportunity to visit Rome, and came away disillusioned by the immorality and corruption he had witnessed there. Obsessed by his own unworthiness, he eventually came to the conclusion that no amount of good works, pilgrimages, fasting, or adherence to Church rituals could be the basis of God’s promise of salvation. If the Christian life is not to be meaningless, he argued that God's grace for the guilty sinner is granted through faith alone, for which he found evidence in the writings of St. Paul; "''The just shall live by faith". Nothing could be further from this concept than the behaviour of the friar Johann Tetzel, whom Archbishop Albert of Mainz had employed to sell the indulgences across Germany; permission had been granted by the Pope in return for a donation to the ongoing reconstruction of St Peter's. Tetzel was a showman, and his preaching not only went beyond the official doctrine of indulgences, but was outrageous. News of this travesty reached the ears of Luther, who had often argued against the sale of indulgences in his sermons. Now he took a more public stand, writing out ninety-five propositions about the nature of faith and the Church, and then, according to some accounts, nailing it to the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg. The tone of his famous Ninety-Five Theses was not defiant, but a scholarly objection to contemporary Church practices, merely intended to be discussion point. However, aided by the printing press, copies of his Theses and other writings spread throughout Germany within two weeks, and throughout Europe within two months, sparking the Reformation that ravages Europe for over a century. The Church eventually moved to put a stop to this impudence. In 1518, Luther was summoned before a papal legate, but refused to recant unless scripture proved him wrong. Instead his positions became increasingly radical, hailing the Bible rather than the Papacy as the sole source of spiritual and theological authority, and the final arbiter of truth. In 1520, the Pope issued an ultimatum threatening Luther with excommunication unless he recant; he publicly burned the letter, and was officially excommunicated. In March 1521, Luther was summoned before the Diet of Worms, the secular assembly of the Holy Roman Empire. Unlike Hus a century earlier, Luther arrived at Worms supported by a large number of enthusiastic German knights to guarantee safe-contuct. Although every effort was made to induce Luther to recant, he again refused, and Emperor Charles V Habsburg (d. 1556) declared him a heretic and outlaw. He spent the next 10-months in hiding as a guest of Frederick the Wise of Saxony, probably motivated by resentment at external interference for the Pope and emperor alike. During this time, Luther completed a task which would profoundly influence the development of the Reformation and German literature; a translation of the New Testament from Greek into pithy colloquial German. Luther's complete Bible, with the Old Testament translated from the Hebrew, was eventually published in 1534; William Tyndale published an English version in 1526, and Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples a French version in 1530. During Luther's absence, efforts in Wittenberg to put his reforms into practice by a radical group had degenerated into popular unrest. Though still under threat of arrest, Luther returned to Wittenberg in 1522, and quickly calmed the situation. By this time Germany was in turmoil, and he was able to spend the rest of his life in his home city, writing and organising the Lutheran Church. Setting a model for later Protestant clergy, Luther married a former nun and had six children. The Protestant Reformation movement diversified almost immediately, with other religious reformers springing-up independently of Luther all over Europe. A movement began in Switzerland under the leadership of '''Huldrych Zwingli (d. 1531), who persuades Zürich to accept sweeping religious reforms largely paralleled Luther’s teachings. Zwingli was soon confronted by reformers even more radical than himself, establishing another major theme of the Reformation, with a profusion of major and minor Protestant denominations. In Zurich, the Anabaptists insisted upon logic in a central ritual of Christianity; that of baptism. If each Christian in the reformed faith is to be personally responsible for his relationship with God, how can an infant be offered the sacrament of baptism? The reaction of Zwingli was swift and extreme. If they wanted water they shall have it; anyone even attending a ceremony of this kind was subjected to death by drowning. No other Christian sect had such a high proportion of martyrs as the Anabaptist, persecuted by Protestants and Catholics alike; its offshoots continue to the present day as the Mennonites and Amish. Meanwhile, Switzerland’s most important contribution to the Reformation was Calvinism, named for John Calvin (d. 1564), a Frenchman forced to flee to Geneva after his conversion to the Protestant cause. His doctrine stressed the corrupt nature of man after the Fall of Adam, and that God predestined some people for salvation, while others were predestined to eternal damnation. It is not easy to understand the success of this gloomy creed, but members managed to convince themselves that they were God's "Chosen People"; those most successful in life tended to join first, claiming to glimpse God's blessing conferred on them in this life. Under Calvin, Geneva was not a place for the easy-going: taverns and dancing were banned; adultery was punishable by death; and ministers made annual visits to every home to check on morality. On the positive side, there was a more democratic approach to church affairs. Geneva became the unofficial epicenter of the Protestant movement, providing refuge for exiles from all over Europe, and educating them as Calvinist missionaries. These missionaries dispersed Calvinism widely, forming the French Huguenots in Calvin's own lifetime, spreading to Scotland under the cantankerous John Knox, and to the Dutch Netherlands, where Calvinists became a religious and economic force for the next 400 years. The Reformation quickly spun-off in political directions. In 1525, German peasants took up Luther's ideas to give voice to longstanding grievances against landlords and clergymen, echoing his language by proclaiming that serfdom was invented by man, with no basis in scripture. The German Peasants' War (1524-25) was Europe's largest popular uprising until the French Revolution. Luther, by nature conservative and cautious, condemned it, siding clearly with the nobles. The revolt was suppressed with crushing brutality, resulting in the slaughter of up to 100,000 poorly armed peasants. In the same year, Duke Albert of Prussia (d. 1568) became the first ruler in Europe to formally break from the Papacy and establish a Protestant state church; he was motivated by a desire to confiscate Church land and wealth. Two years later 1527, Sweden followed suited spearheaded by King Gustav Vasa (d. 1560), who forced the parliament to accept his dominion over the national church, and plundered Church property with remarkable cynicism. His example was followed by Henry VIII of England, with a little more decorum but no less efficiency. The Catholic Church was slow to respond to the Protestant Reformation, and the internal problems that had triggered it. The most formal expressions of the spiritual renewal of the Church, which we remember as the Counter-Reformation, 'was the Council of Trent (1545-63), a general ecumenical council that met on-and-off for 18-years. On the question of abuses within the Church, the council accepted the validity of the criticism, and put in place corrective measures. Such reforms included the foundation of seminaries to properly train the clergy in matters of theology, and prepare them for a more austere life in the service of the Church. By contrast, the council refused to yield an inch on doctrinal matters, with various theologians set to the task of defending the Church's positions and practices that had been attacked by Protestant reformers, such as the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the rejection of clerical marriage. A new mood of spirituality and fervour already apparent among the faithful in the 15th-century fed the Counter-Reformation too. One of the most potent and enduring expressions was founded by a Spanish nobleman, Ignatius of Loyola (d. 1556). To the challenges of the drift of much of Europe into Protestant heresy and opening up of a far-flung pagan world, Ignatius could bring the energy and organizing skills of a trained military man. In 1534, he and a few companions took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience; the Society of Jesus was formally recognized by the Church in 1540. The Jesuit Order, as they soon came to be called, were to have an importance in the history of the Church akin to that of the Benedictines or Franciscans of the 13th-century. Their warrior-founder liked to think of them to the militia of the Church, utterly disciplined and completely subordinate to Papal authority; they were colloquially referred to as "''God's soldier". By the end of Ignatius's life, his order had about 1,000 members. In Europe, the task of the order was teaching and arguing against the Protestant cause; their work transformed Catholic education, and their intellectual eminence raised them to high places in the courts of kings. They were also in the forefront of missionary efforts in every part of the world, notably Francis Xavier in India, and Matteo Ricci in China. The same reforming zeal as St. Ignatius was applied to monasteries by the Spanish mystics Teresa of Ávila (d. 1582) and John of the Cross (d. 1591). Thus reinforced, the Catholic Church was suddenly well-placed to confront the Protestant challenge, providing standards to which Catholic rulers would rally. Along with the religious consequences of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation came deep and lasting '''political changes. Whole nation states were embroiled in the growing religious fissure, with England, Scotland, Scandinavia, and the Dutch Netherlands identifying as Protestant, and Spain and Italy remaining staunchly Catholic. In Switzerland, France, imperial Germany, and Ireland the situation was even more complicated. Europe's new religious choice came at great cost, with an orgy of rebellions, bloody wars, and brutal persecution, with martyrs on both sides in the tens-of-thousands. The Thirty Years' War alone cost Germany at least 25% of its population. In this very fluid situation, local Catholic or Protestant authorities felt a need to impress the faithful with their own zeal. Prosecutions for witchcraft reached a peak between 1580 and 1630, when at least 40,000 were burned at the stake; 80% of them women. For the Jews, the Reformation brought a new wave of persecution; deeply ingrained anti-semitism marked the attitudes of Luther and Calvin. From the 16th-century, the ghetto became the environment of Jewish communities, in part because Christians wished to control the minority in their midst, and part was the need of Jews to protect themselves from Christian mobs. The Peace of Westphalia (1645), which concluded the Thirty Years' War, is generally considered the end of both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. Other argue that it never ended since the residual bitterness persisted through European history to our own time. A quarter-century of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland from 1970 reveals all too vividly that the dark side of the Reformation is not entirely a thing of the past. Yet the Reformation’s positive repercussions can be seen in the intellectual and cultural flourishing it inspired on all sides of the schism. By encouraging ordinary people to read the Bible in their own languages, Luther provided one of the most effective arguments for universal literacy and education. By bringing an end to the blind faith in the Catholic Church, the Reformation subtly empowered people to question the world around them, unrestricted by the traditional teachings of the Church, thus leading to the Scientific Revolution. Historian Max Weber famously credited the "Protestant work ethic" for the birth of modern capitalism based on the examples of English and Dutch success. Most historians no longer find this idea plausible; there were too many successful Catholic capitalists for one thing, and Protestant Scotland long remained comparatively backwards and poor. But perhaps the most important aspect of the Protestant Reformation is contained within the words: Protest and Reform. Popular protest that could fuel real and lasting reform would be a central theme of the Modern Age, ranging from the French Revolution to the American civil rights movement. Henry VIII of England Neither Lutheranism nor Calvinism provoked the first major rejection of Papal authority by a nation-state. In England a unique religious change arose almost by accident. Henry VIII Tudor (1509-1549 AD) began his reign with much optimism. He was 17-years-old, well-educated, handsome, gregarious in manner, with the physic of an athlete, and stood in sharp contrast to his wary, reserved father, Henry VII. Soon after his accession, Henry married his brother’s widow Catherine of Aragon (d. 1536), a wedding arranged by his father to affirm his alliance with Spain. A wife in any great dynastic marriage was expected to provide two assets: a diplomatic alliance with her own royal house, and a male heir for her husband's. Of the two the latter was by far the more important to Henry, an understandable preoccupation to assure the Tudor line just 30-years after the bitter War of the Roses. It was the one which Catherine tragically failed to fulfill. She bore Henry six children, three of them sons, but none survived infancy except for one girl, the future Queen Mary I. The lack of a legitimate male heir gnawed at the king, for England last queen, Maude, in the 12th-century had been a disaster. It is still a subject of debate whether Henry’s decision to seek an annulment of his marriage and wed Anne Boleyn (d. 1536) was a matter of state, of love, or of conscience; quite possibly all three operated. Anne, one of the ladies-of-the-court, was everything that the queen was not; young, vivacious, and presumably fruitful. A divorce would take the intervention of the Pope. Henry's Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey (d. 1530), was at first optimistic. The argument hinged ostensibly on two contradictory verses of the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 25:5 and Leviticus 20.21). Leviticus seemed to support Henry's assertion that his marriage to his brother's widow had been from the start against holy writ and therefore invalid. As ever a more practical argument decided the case. Catherine was not simply the king’s wife; she was also the aunt of the emperor Charles V Habsburg, the most powerful ruler in Europe. The Pope could not afford to grant the annulment. The reversal brought an end to Wolsey's career, who fell ill and died just in time to escape trial for treason. Henry's own reaction was forceful. In the midst of the Protestant Reformation, with the tempting example in Sweden's independent national church, did England need the Pope? The king possibly would never have won his annulment had there not existed in England men who desired a break with Rome, among them Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell. By early 1533, Anne Boleyn, still Henry's mistress, was pregnant, bringing matters to a head. In a fever of activity, the king secretly married Anne in January, intimidated the English clergy into installing Thomas Cranmer as archbishop of Canterbury in March, parliament approved crucial legislation in April, an obliging archbishop declared the king's marriage annulled in May, and Anne was crowned rightful queen of England in June. Anne Boleyn gave birth to a daughter three months later, the future Queen Elizabeth I; Henry was so disappointed that he did not attend her baptism. There followed a period of consolidation taking the form of statutes completing the break from Rome, protecting the English Reformations from challenge, convincing the public of their legitimacy, and dealing with opponents. The Pope retaliated with a sentence of excommunication; it troubled no one. With the Act of Supremacy (1534), parliament declared that Henry VIII was head of the Church of England. A few brave men refused to swear on oath their acceptance of this new doctrine, principally because it implied denial of the Pope's supremacy. By the end of Henry's reign, some 300 Catholic martyrs died agonising deaths at the stake, including the Bishop Fisher of Rochester and the former Lord Chancellor Thomas More. Within weeks of the Act of Supremacy, Henry commissioned his principal secretary, Thomas Cromwell, to make a detailed survey of ecclesiastical property in England and Wales with a view to expropriation. Cromwell's agents were also to find evidence of immorality and financial impropriety; not hard to find at the time. In 1536 the process began of the dissolution of monasteries with their rich swathes of land, which was completed with great efficiency by 1541. Most of the land was sold to the landed nobility and wealthy middle class. Valuable funds flow into the royal treasury, while the new owners found in the abbey buildings a supply of excellent stone for a slew of picturesque Tudor manor-houses. Yet Henry VIII himself was no religious reformer; indeed he had been granted the title Defender of the Faith by a previous pope his profound criticism of Martin Luther. The king had not so much denied the Pope, as replaced him; doctrine was barely involved. Instead of the Roman Catholic Church there is to be an English Catholic Church. Under Thomas Cranmer's guidance, the Church of England was gradually transformed into a recognisably Protestant body during the reign of Edward VI Tudor. Not many men have six wives, and even fewer execute two, so it’s not surprising that Henry VIII Tudor (1509-1549 AD), son of Henry VII, has an assured niche in popular history of England. The king was married to Catherine of Aragon for over two decades, then fitted five more wives into just 14-years that made him appear both a monster and a laughingstock. Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, at first passionate, lasted only three years. Anne's downfall came shortly after she had recovered from her second miscarriage of a baby boy in January 1536. In an all-out effort to leave his unfruitful marriage, Henry contrived an elaborate story that Anne had committed adultery with five men including her own brother. In May 1536, Anne had been found guilty of treasonous adultery in a trial that was a travesty, and lost her head on tower green. Henry immediately married Jane Seymour, another lady-of-the-court. The following year, Jane did at last produce the long-awaited male heir, the future Edward VI. But she herself died twelve days after the birth. Henry's next marriage also led to a death, but not in this case that of the bride. Thomas Cromwell, the king's right-hand-man on all matters for eight years and architect of the English Reformation, persuaded his master that an alliance with a Protestant German house was a diplomatic necessity. The proposed bride was Anne of Cleves. Henry disliked her on first sight, dubbing her the Flanders Mare, and refused to consummate the marriage. Anne did not argue the king's request for a divorce six-months later, by a compliant English church and parliament; she received the title of "The King's Sister", two houses and a generous allowance. Thomas Cromwell paid for this blunder with his head. Less than three weeks after the annulment, 49-year-old Henry married yet another lady-of-the-court; 17-year-old Catherine Howard. For a year, the king gained a new zest for life with his young, joyous and carefree bride. Catherine's folly was continuing her promiscuity, even as queen. When Henry discovered that she had been neither a virgin at the wedding, nor faithful as a wife, she ended up on the scaffold. Henry’s sixth and final marriage was to 31-year-old Catherine Parr. Well-educated, independent, and twice widowed herself, Parr bore him no children, but made him happy, and succeeded in reconciling the king's family. For the remaining few years of his life, Henry's three children, from three separate mothers, all live together for the first time in the royal household. Domestically, Henry greatly expanded royal power during his reign. He knew how to work with parliaments, which him appear more dominant than ever, and gave his reign a spurious air of autocracy; in fact the rule of law remained to control the sovereign’s whims. The sense of autocracy was emphasized by Henry's frequent use of royal prerogative, with executions for treason without a formal trial by means of bills of attainder. He burned or beheaded two wives, four chief ministers, twenty peers, six close attendants and friends, two cardinals and numerous abbots. Henry maintained a lavish court and household, including the construction or renovation of several palaces, in conscious competition with his fellow European monarchs, especially Francis I of France. Nonsuch Palace, Westminster Abbey, Hampton Court Palace, and Whitehall Palace were all built or extended. Despite the healthy treasury inherited from his father and proceeds from the dissolution of the monasteries, the king was continually on the verge of financial ruin. Henry desire to cut a figure on the European battlefields led him into numerous costly wars. Allied with Spain, England entered the Italian Wars against France in 1512, but accomplished little; Henry was not even present at the one notable victory, the Battle of the Spurs (August 1513). Meanwhile, the French activated the Auld Alliance with Scotland, who invaded northern England under James IV Stewart (d. 1513). The disastrous Battle of Flodden (September 1513), the largest battle fought between the two kingdoms in terms of numbers, left 10,000 Scots dead, among them the Scottish king. He was succeeded by his one-year-old son, James V, and Scotland entered a profoundly unsettled period. Relations with Spain soured after Henry's annulment, but with Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn both dead, a new alliance with Charles V Habsburg was agreed in 1539. In preparation for a planned invasion of France in 1543, Henry moved preemptively to eliminate the Scottish threat, defeating them decisively at the Battle of Solway Moss (November 1542); King James V Stewart of Scotland died shortly afterwards, it was said of a broken heart. There followed eight years of desultory warfare between England and Scotland, traditionally dubbed the Rough Wooing; Henry VIII's military attempt to force a marriage between Mary Queen of Scots and his own son, Edward. Despite the early success with Scotland, Henry and Charles squabbled, failed to coordinate their campaigns. England was soon left alone against France. Having siezed Boulogne in 1544, peace was agreed two years later, handing back the city for barely the cost of the campaign. Henry also oversaw the legal union of England and Wales, and set in motion the Tudor Conquest of Ireland. Later in life, Henry suffered from chronic ill-health, and became obese, hastening his death in 1547 after a reign of 38-years. He was succeeded by his 9-year-old son, Edward VI Tudor. Early Reformation in Germany In Germany, the Protestant Reformation became inexorably entangled in German politics. The princes of states were increasingly hostile to external interference in their affairs, whether from the Pope or Holy Roman Emperor. The Renaissance Popes were seen as devious and distant intriguers, who drained away money from local church lands and regularly demanded more. Emperor Charles V Habsburg, lord of vast new Habsburg territories, was now also a distant figure whose interests seemed as much Spanish as German. In rebellious mood already, the religious options suddenly on offer seemed a political opportunity to affirm their autonomy. At the Diet of Speyer (1526), the emperor attempted to calm the situation, by ending the outright ban on Luther's teachings imposed five years earlier at Worms, and instead each German prince was to take his own decision on the matter. Within three years, five princes and fourteen free cities had adopted Protestantism. The need to restore religious and political unity in the German land was made all the more urgent by the shock of the Siege of Vienna (September 1529) by the Ottoman Turks. At the Diet of Augsburg (1530), Charles V took a harder line, decreeing that all Protestant princes and cities must recant, and restore all Church property which had been seized. This led to the formation of the League of Schmalkalden (1531), a Protestant pact for mutual military defence. The political conditions meant that military conflict did not immediately follow; the emperor needed support for his war against the Turks, while the Protestant princes could count on the support of Francis I of France, Charles' bitter rival. By 1545, the Treaty of Crépy with France and a temporary cessation of hostilities with the Truks allowed Charles to focus on his internal enemies. The ensuing war saw the emperor victorious at the Battle of Mühlberg (April 1547), but it was not enough to bring peace and inconclusive fighting dragged on for another six years; no military victory could resolve the deep religious divisions within the empire. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) acknowledged the reality which had emerged in the years since Luther's ninety-five theses sparked off the conflict, restoring the compromise of 1526, later epitomized in the phrase, “''he who governs the territory decides its religion''”. These terms make it clear that the real winners of the war were the German princes, whose authority and power, which now encompassed the church, were greatly increased. It thus closed one epoch of German history and opened another. The Holy Roman Empire lost all true political meaning, a tapestry of Protestant and Catholic states; in general the more secular northern principalities adopted Lutheran teachings, while the clerical lords in the south and Austria stuck with Catholicism. But the religious issue refused to die, and in 1618 it degenerated into the bloody Thirty Years' War. Scandinavia Reformation In comparison to the religious turmoil that would engulf the European powerhouses of Germany, England, and France, all of Scandinavia ultimately adopted Lutheran Protestantism much more peacefully. After the Viking Age of the 10th-century, the Nordic counties played a rather peripheral role in European politics. The story of the intervening 500 years is one of Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian dynasties struggling to maintain stable kingdoms, sometimes with the added ambition of bringing the others into a political union. At various times different kingdoms became dominant within this Scandinavian triangle. Finland effectively became a Swedish possession in 1155, and was a frequent venue for Swedish territorial squabbles with Russia. After the 14th-century, Norway became a junior partner, first to Sweden, then to Denmark, and then to Sweden again. Denmark and Sweden meanwhile engage in two closely related methods of shifting the balance of power; warfare and dynastic marriages. One such marriage led at last to the personal union of all three crowns under Queen Margaret of Denmark (1389-1412). The so-called Kalmar Union (1397-1523) was only briefly a political reality, but remained an aspiration for over a century. In the early-16th-century, Iceland fell under Danish hegemony, with Danish merchants establishing a monopoly on its resources that lasted nearly 200 years. In Sweden, which also ruled Finland, the Protestant Reformation was spearheaded by king Gustav I Vasa (1523-60), who ascended to the throne following the rebellion that marked the country's permanent secession from the Kalmar Union; he is considered the founder of modern Sweden, and the date of his coronation is now the country's national day. The new king's position was precarious. How to fill his empty treasury in a country where only the Church was rich? And how to get rid of his most prominent opponent, the Archbishop of Sweden? The solution to both problems seemed to presented itself when Gustav was introduced to the reformers Olaf and Laurentius Petri, who had recently returned from studying at the University of Wittenberg with Martin Luther. At the Diet of Västerås (1527), Sweden broke from the Papacy and was declared Lutheran Protestant; the first country to do so, almost a decade before Henry VIII of England. Gustavus had no religious convictions but a great need of funds, and plundered Church property with astonishing cynicism. With some of the wealth appropriated he bought the support of the nobles. The bulk he kept for himself, administrating it as crown lands which gave him a stature far greater than any of his rivals. Some was spent on a standing army and navy. With complications from time to time, the crown remained in Gustav's family until the Napoleonic wars, during which Sweden emerged as a European power, terrorizing Russia, Poland–Lithuania, and Germany in multiple conflicts, including the Thirty Years' War. Meanwhile in Denmark, which also ruled Norway and Iceland, under Frederick I Oldenburg (1523–33) the country remained officially Catholic, but Lutheran preachers were protected, of whom the most famous were Hans Tausen (d. 1561) and Johannes Bugenhagen (d. 1558). Frederick's Protestant sympathies resulted in a civil war upon his death, when the Catholic majority in parliament refused to acknowledge his son, Christian. Christian III Oldenburg (1536-59) became king of Denmark after capturing Copenhagen. He immediately established the Danish Lutheran Church, arrested Catholic bishops, confiscated their property, and dissolved the monasteries. The Norwegian Lutheran Church was in existence by 1539. Iceland resisted a little longer, but it too was Lutheran by 1550. Brought to the new faith in a few short years, on the personal conviction of two powerful rulers, Scandinavia has nevertheless remained firmly Lutheran ever since. Francis I and Charles V Henry VIII of England was just one of a trio of autocratic young European rulers born within a few years of each other. A new mood of youth and vigour entered the French court with the accession of the 20-year-old Francis I Valois (1515-47), a cousin of Louis XII, and married to his daughter. In a spirit of adventure, Francis took up his father-in-law's ailing and expensive Italian Wars (1494-1559). In the summer of 1515 he personally rode south, recaptured Milan, and defeated the forces of the League of Venice at the Battle at Marignano (September), including the ranks of Swiss infantry whose pikes and halberds had previously seemed invincible. In a mood of medieval chivalry, Francis was knighted on the battlefield a famous French knight, Pierre de Bayard, known in his own lifetime as the "knight without fear and beyond reproach". The first year of his reign thus made Francis the most glamorous monarch in Europe. The French king, liking what he saw of the Italian Renaissance, was determined to enjoy these splendours. He invited Italian artists to France, including the aged Leonardo da Vinci who moved to Amboise as “''first painter and engineer and architect''”, bringing with him the Mona Lisa which was taken into the French royal collection. The artists adorned France not with castles, but palaces such as the magnificent Château de Fontainebleau and Château de Chambord, two of the most recognisable châteaux in the world because of their very distinctive French Renaissance architecture. Francis also began to Paris's old royal castle, the Louvre, into yet another palace. Moreover, he married his son to Caterina de' Medici (d. 1589), who, though infamous for her role in the French Wars of Religion, made an important contribution in bringing arts, sciences, music, and ballet to the French court from her native Florence. Writers such as François Rabelais, painters such as Jean Clouet, and musicians such as Jean Mouton also borrowed from the spirit of the Renaissance. But in 1519, there was a serious challenge to Francis' status as the premier monarch of Europe. The great diplomatic event of 1519 was Charles V Habsburg (1516-56) succeeding his grandfather Maximilian as Holy Roman Emperor. Careful marriages in the past made him the ruler of the furthest-flung territorial empire the world had ever seen. From his mother, he inherited the Spanish crown, and therefore both interests in southern Italy, and in the newly discovered Americas. From his father came the imperial title, Austria, Bohemia (modern-day Czechia and Slovakia), Hungary, Flanders, the Dutch Netherlands, and a bundle of claims in northern Italy. The French king had been so alarmed at being surrounded by Habsburg lands, that he personally contested the German imperial election. Though there was little chance of a French king being elected, Charles V took no risks, dispensing vast sums in bribes to clinch the imperial crown. Charles would be constantly on the verge of bankruptcy, despite his vast realm and a growing flow of bullion from the Americas. This election was the first encounter in a rivalry between Charles and Francis which came to dominate the politics of western Europe. In the midst of the Protestant Reformation, there was every reason for the two leading Catholic monarchs in Europe to stand together, but a large measure of personal animosity meant war was inevitable. Preparing for war against his rival, Francis attempted first to secure an important ally on his northern flank, inviting Henry VIII of England in 1520 to the spectacularly lavish meeting which becomes known as the Field of Cloth of Gold. This summit made a great impression on contemporaries, but failed to deliver an alliance; instead Henry immediately moved on to a less sumptuous but more fruitful meeting with Charles V in Kent. Open conflict broke out in in 1522, when the French were driven-out of Milan by an imperial army. Two years later, Francis personally led his army into northern Italy to reclaim his lost territory, with disastrous consequences. The French were heavily defeated at the Battle of Pavia (February 1525), and Francis himself was taken prisoner. Soon he was in a fortress in Madrid, negotiating with Charles under duress. After six months, the French king secured his release by giving up his claims in Italy, as well as in the Low Countries and Burgundy. But Francis had little intention of keeping his word. Within months, he had formed a new alliance with the Papacy and Venice. This time it was the Pope who soon found himself captured when an imperial army captured and sacked Rome in 1527. This shocking event prompted a new peace, known as the Ladies Peace because it was negotiated by Francis' mother and Charles' aunt, which confirmed the concessions made by Francis in Madrid, except Charles renounced his claim to Burgundy. While coping with French hostility, Charles V had other major concerns not shared by his rival; Protestant unrest causing turmoil in Germany, and aggression from the Ottoman Turks on the empire's eastern frontier and in the Mediterranean. Simply unable to accept the defeat by his rival, Francis went to war twice more against Charles, in 1536 and 1542, with no better results. An alliance between France and the Turks suggests very well the bitterness of this royal rivalry. With both side having financial difficulties and pressing internal problems, the Treaty of Crépy (1544) brought the long conflict between France and the Habsburg to an unsatisfying conclusion. The legacy both rulers is generally considered mixed. Francis I achieved great cultural feats, but they came at the expense of France's economic well-being, and his response to the Reformation succeeded merely in stalling the French Wars of Religion. Charles won almost every war he fought, but abdicated in frustration soon after conceding the Peace of Augsburg (1555), and abandoned his multi-national project, dividing his vast domains between the Spanish Habsburgs headed by his son Philip II of Spain and the Austrian Habsburgs headed by his brother Ferdinand I of Austria. Ottoman Heyday After the fall of Constantinople to Mehmed the Conqueror in 1453, the Ottoman Turkish war machine rolled on. Throughout the 16th century, the political situation in Eastern Europe and the Middle East depended largely on which neighbour was best resisting the expansionist tendencies of the Ottoman Empire. If the Sultan's Janissaries were fighting Mamluk Egypt or the Persians, then the Hungarians and their allies had a respite; and vice versa. Later Russia to the north became another factor in this constant jostling for space. Under Mehmed 's son, Bayazid II (d. 1512), the Turks thrust mainly to the west, driving the Venetians out of their last Adriatic port in the Peloponnese by 1501. During his son's reign, Selim I (d. 1520), the focus shifted to the east, where the new Safavid Dynasty (1501–1736) was becoming a threat. While the Ottomans were rebuilding something like the Byzantime Empire, another power had emerged in Persia which was also reminiscent of the past. For four centuries, conquerors had come and gone, first the Seljuk Turks and then the Mongols. The Safavids emerged from the classical Persian heartland of Medes, to unite all the Persian lands for the first time since the Arab invasions had shattered the Sassanids, and reassert the Persian identity in the region. They were also passionately committed to the Shi'a version of Islam and made Persia Shi'a, putting them on a collision course with the Sunni Ottomans. At the Battle of Chaldiran (August 1514), the Safavids were no match for the highly trained Janissaries and skilfully handled Turkish artillery, and suffered a decisive defeat, but this encounter was only the beginning of a long rivalry. Selim's reign is most notable for the enormous expansion to the south, at the expense of the Mamlūk Sultanate of Egypt. His well-organized and disciplined army supported by artillery was able to overwhelm the Mamlūks in a single, yearlong campaign (1516–17), bringing all of Syria, Palestine, Arabia and Egypt under Ottoman control. Selim's conquest of the eastern Mediterranean heartlands of the Muslim world, and particularly his assumption of the role of guardian of the pilgrimage routes to Mecca and Medina, established the Ottoman Empire as the most prestigious of all Sunni Muslim states. Beyond Egypt, the Ottoman gradually extended their territory against the declining local Moorish (Berber) dynasties in a somewhat unorthodox manner. Their successful device was to allow Turkish pirates to establish themselves along the coast; known to the Berbers as the Barbary Coast. One of the first and most famous of such pirates was Khayr "Barbarossa" ad-Din (d. 1546), who captured Algiers in 1516, and assumed control over the city and surrounding region. Two others were firmly established by 1551, and a third by 1574. These territories were given formal status as protectorates of the Ottoman Empire, but piracy against Christian European shipping remained their chief purpose and main source of income. After three centuries, the depredations of Barbary pirates would prompt French intervention in Algeria. Selim was followed as Sultan by his son Suleiman I (1520-66), commonly known as Suleiman the Magnificent. Suleiman assumed the throne with a position unparalleled by any Sultan before or after, without internal opposition, and great wealth, power, and prestige thanks to his father's conquests. He was the first Ottoman ruler to formally adopt the title of Caliph, implying overall leadership of the Muslim world; a title claimed by right of conquest from the Abbasid Caliphs, who had resided in Cairo as a Mamluk puppet ever since the sack of Baghdad in 1258. Suleiman began his reign with campaigns against the Christian European powers, encouraged by the current political climate. Hungary had long opposed Ottoman expansion beyond the Balkans, but was now divided and vulnerable, with an ineffectual king devoted to a life of pleasure, a fractious nobility, and a breakdown of order in the wake of the György Dózsa peasant revolt of 1514. Moreover, it could expect little aid from the rest of Europe, due to the open hostility between Francis I of France and Charles V Habsburg. Belgrade, the strongest Hungarian fortress on the Danube in the south, fell to the Turksin 1521, opening the heart of Hungary to Ottoman conquest. In 1526, Suleiman launched his invasion, this time responding to a direct appeal from Francis, after his defeat at the Battle of Pavia, to make war on Habsburg Austria through Hungary, The Ottomans made straight for the River Drava, a tributary of the Danube, where Suleiman expected the Hungarians to make a stand, but was surprised to meet almost no opposition; the squabbling Hungarian nobility refused to march unless led by King Louis II himself. At the Battle of Mohács (August 1526), the Hungarians attacked the enemy with great courage but little wisdom, and were soundly thrashed in less than two hours by superior Ottoman numbers and martial discipline; among the estimated 18,000 dead was the king himself. Mohács was a watershed moment in Hungarian history; a relatively prosperous and independent medieval kingdom died that day. After Budapest fell to the Turks in 1541, Hungary was torn in two, with the Turks taking two-thirds, and Charles V Habsburg for all practical purposes annexing the western strip adjacent to Austria, claiming it as brother-in-law of King Louis II. This set the stage for centuries of Habsburg-Ottoman warfare, including two great sieges of Vienna, a century-and-a-half apart. The first, in October 1529, was the meeting of two powers at their peaks. Suleiman besieged the city with as many as 100,000 men and 300 cannons, but for reasons that are unclear today, they withdrew back to Hungary after just 18-days. Unseasonably heavy rain and snowfall had sapped Ottoman morale, and prevented Suleiman from bringing his heavy artillery. During this campaign, the Ottomans did capture a number of key fortresses that secured their rule of Hungary, which some historians speculate had been his true goal. Having stabilized his European frontiers, Suleiman now turned his attention to the ever-present threat posed by the Shi'a Safavids of Persia. His first of three campaigns dislodged the Safavids from territories in the southern Caucasus and Iraq, including their capital of Tabriz and Baghdad. However, the subsequent campaigns failed to bring his elusive Persian enemies to open battle, who refuse to confront the Ottomans directly, withdrawing into the Persian interior and using harassment and scorched-earth tactics. In the end, Suleiman had to settle for an unsatisfactory peace in 1555, that left Persia intact. In addition to gaining considerable territory over three continents. Suleiman led several naval campaigns. In the Mediterranean, he finally captured Rhodes in 1522, from which the Knights Hospitaller had organised piratical raids against Ottoman ships and shores for more than a century. Rhodes only fell after an arduous six-months siege of the Knights' castle, one of the most formidable bastion in Christendom. By 1537, a string of Venetian islands in the Aegean had also been captured, finally prompting a vigorous Christian response. Charles V and Pope Paul III succeeded in assembling a powerful alliance called the Holy League, including Spain, Venice and Genoa, However, in one of the largest sea-battles of the 16th-century, the allied fleet was decisively defeated at the naval Battle of Preveza (September 1538), fought around the same gulf as the Battle of Actium (31 BC). Ottoman supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean remained unchallenged until the the Battle of Lepanto (October 1571). In the Indian Ocean, Suleiman campaigned against the Portuguese in an attempt to reestablish trade with the Mughal Empire. The Ottomans failed against the Portuguese at the Battle of Diu, but built major naval bases at Suez and Aden on the Red Sea, as well as Basra on the Persian Gulf. These managed to dispute control of the trade routes with India throughout the 16th century. While Suleiman was known as "the Magnificent" by his Christian enemies, to his own Ottoman subjects he was always Kanuni Suleiman ("the Lawgiver"). Having effectively recreated the old empire of Justinian the Great, like the great Byzantine Emperor, Suleiman completely overhauled the Ottoman legal system. The overriding law of the empire was Islamic Sharia law, but judgments had been issued by each of the nine preceding Sultans, covering areas such as criminal law, land tenure, and taxation. After eliminating duplications and choosing between contradictory statements, he issued a single legal code, all the while being careful not to violate the basic laws of Islam. In his own judgements, Suleiman gave particular attention to the plight of the downtrodden; he denounced the persecution of Jews in the Catholic West, and freed Hungarian peasants from serfdom. He also reformed the tax system, making it more transparent and fair. Suleiman surrounded himself with administrators and statesmen of unusual ability, who presided over an imperial bureaucracy in which hiring and promotion was based on merit, rather than family ties or the whims of high officials. Education was another important area for the Sultan. Schools attached to mosques provided a largely free education to Muslim boys, surpassing anything available in Western Europe at the time. Under Suleiman's patronage, the Ottoman Empire entered the Golden Age of its cultural development. The great Turkish poet Bâkî and architect Mimar Sinan made the period memorable. Suleiman adorned the cities of his empire with mosques, baths, libraries, hospitals, roads, bridges, aqueducts, and various social establishments. The greatest of these were built by Sinan, who was responsible for over three hundred monuments, including his two masterpieces, the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul and Selimiye Mosque in Adrianople (Edirne). The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and Kaaba in Mecca were also renovated. Suleiman's reforms gave the Ottoman Empire a recognizably modern administration and legal system At the time of Suleiman's death in 1566, the Ottoman Empire was one of the foremost powers in the world. However, in the decades after Suleiman, the empire began to experience internal institutional, economic, and social pressure, as well as external strain from the rapidly rising costs of warfare. These led to a series of political crises, and the stagnation of the Ottoman Empire, followed a slow but steady decline. Spanish Conquest of the Americas By 1515 enough had been done for the business of exploration, for new enterprises to be attacked with confidence; there was a cumulative factor at work, as each successful voyage added both to knowledge and to the certainty that more could be done. Confident in the "true religion" of Christianity, Europeans were impatient, and contemptuous of the achievements of the civilizations they disturbed. In the end this led to uncomfortable results from the outset in European enterprise; to abuse of power, to exploitation by force, to great crimes – though they were often committed unconsciously. Discovering new lands in the Americas brought glory, but what Christopher Columbus and subsequent explorers wanted was gold. That’s not to say there weren’t riches; the land was fertile, the seas bountiful, and the native populations forcibly pliant. The Spanish rapidly made headway with settlement of the bigger of the West Indies; Hispaniola (1493), Puerto Rico (1508), Jamaica (1509), Cuba (1511), and later Trinidad (1530). They largely ignored the smaller islands, to their later regret; an exception was made for Margarita (1525) and Cubagua (1528) because of their valuable pearl beds. The cornerstone of the first cathedral in the Americas was laid in 1512; the Spaniards had come to stay. The economy of the West Indies rested on agriculture, with sugar and tobacco as the primary products; the first sugar mill in the New World was established in 1516. Hundred-of-thousands of the conquered indigenous peoples were enslaved as field labour, but the scheme was not a success, as they succumbed rapidly to diseases brought from Spain, such as smallpox, influenza, measles, and typhus, to which they had no immunity. The islands soon came to depend on African-born slaves; the first sizable shipment arrived in 1518, purchased from the Portuguese. Spain's colonization of the continental Americas started in 1502, with what became the city of Cumaná (modern-day Venezuela) and Santa María la Antigua del Darién (Panama), from which Vasco Núñez de Balboa made his famous march to the Pacific in 1513. There the Spaniards heard garbled reports of the wealth and splendour of Aztec Mexico and Inca Peru. Expeditions sent by the governor of Cuba to explore the Mexican coast in 1517 and '18 made contact with the decayed Mayan civilization of Yucatán, and brought news of the cities and precious metals of the Aztecs civilisation. A larger expedition was rapidly prepared to investigate this wealthy realm under the conquistador Hernán Cortés (d. 1547). Cortés landed on the coast of Mexico in March 1519, with eleven ships, carrying some 530 soldier, 16 horses, and about 30 guns, where he was welcome by representatives of the Aztec ruler Moctezuma II (d. 1520). A few things quickly became clear: that Mexico was wealthy, that the Aztecs held together many rebellious vassals by sheer force, and that the Aztecs viewed him with superstitious awe, due to his resemblance to the light-skinned Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. Deliberately flouting the orders of the governor of Cuba to simply explore and trade, Cortés founded the settlement Veracruz, had himself elected governor, and subsequently justified his acts by the spoils he brought to the crown. Before proceeding inland, Cortés made a bold gesture; scuttling his ships to discourage mutiny. On the march to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, the conquistadors clashed repeatedly with the locals. Though Cortés’ followers were few, they had great advantages and a lot of luck. The people upon whom they advanced were technologically primitive, and gunpowder, steel, and horses quickly proved decisive. After defeating the powerful Tlaxcala people, Cortés secured an alliance with them; the Tlaxcalans had been in a state of almost permanent warfare with their overlords, and any enemy of the Aztecs was a friend of theirs. At the holy city of Cholula, the conquistadors massacred thousands of unarmed citizens in a two day sack, either in fear of treachery or in a pre-meditated act to instill fear in the Aztecs. Despite this, Moctezuma welcomed Cortés and his small force into the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in November 1519, now augmented by thousands of Tlaxcalans. With a brilliantly controlled blend of persuasion and threat, Cortés brought the Aztec emperor under Spanish "protection", and began to rule his empire through their prisoner. Meanwhile, second Spanish expedition led by Pánfilo Narváez arrived in Veracruz in April 1520, sent by the governor of Cuba to arrest Cortés. Leaving 200 men in Tenochtitlán, Cortés marched east against Narváez, defeated him, and persuaded the remaining men to enlist in his own forces. In his absence, the Spanish garrison commander lost control of Tenochtitlán, with his decision to retaliated by massacring hundreds during a festival only making matters worse. On his return, Cortés forces Montezuma to address his people, urging peace, but he was met with a hail of missiles; he died shortly afterwards, either mortally wounded by his own people or murder by the Spanish. In the end, the conquistador had no choice but to retreat from the city, which was achieved with heavy losses. After six days of retreat, Cortés won the Battle of Otumba (July 1520) over the Aztecs sent in pursuit. He and his men spent the next year with their Tlaxcalan allies licking their wounds, however another deadly weapon soon aided the Spaniards. A smallpox epidemic swept through Mexico killing at least 40% of the population within the first years, including the new Aztec emperor. After subduing the depleted neighbouring territories around Tenochtitlán, Cortés laid siege to the city itself, which finally fell in August 1521. There was no further Aztec resistance; a few hundred Spaniards had conquered a huge territory stretching from the Mexican Gulf to the Pacific Ocean. After conquering the Aztecs, the Spanish quickly subjugated the other indigenous tribes of the region, with only the Maya of the Yucatan putting up an effective resistance. The Spanish secured the coast by the late-540s, but indigenous peoples in the jungle interior preserved their independent way of life for another century and a half. The Spanish destroyed the precious artefacts of nearly three millennia of indigenous civilization in Mesoamerica with an unprecedented thoroughness; usually in their lust for gold and silver, but sometimes in an ideological attack on paganism, as in the case of Mayan manuscripts. The result is that there is relatively little known today about these rich cultures. Meanwhile, royal officials were sent out in 1523 to rule what Cortes has conquered, with Mexico becoming the cornerstone of the Spanish Empire in the Americas, dubbed ''New Spain''. While Charles V Habsburg was warmly receiving Hernán Cortés and his unimaginable riches at the Spanish court in Toledo in 1428, another veteran of the New World was in the city drumming up support for a similar voyage of conquest; Francisco Pizarro (d. 1541). A year earlier, two small Spanish ships exploring the west coast of South America were surprised to come across an ocean-going raft with a crew of twenty. The exchange was amicable, with the two parties agreeing to trade. The contents of the raft astonished them; gold and silver personal ornaments, and a bag of emeralds and other jewels to trade. This chance encounter was the first contact between Europeans and the fabulously wealthy [[Early Age of Discovery#The Americas|'Inca civilisation']]. In July 1529, Pizarro was made governor of the unexplored lands for a distance 600 miles south of Panama. Joined by four of his brothers, Pizarro sailed for Panama in January 1530, and by January of the following year was ready to set-out for Peru with 180 men and 37 horses. Meanwhile, European diseases had already initiated the conquest for him. A smallpox epidemic swept down from Panama and Central America killing millions, including the Inca king Huayna Capac (1527) and his eldest son. It also provoked a five year civil war between the remaining sons, that only ended shortly before Pizarro's arrival, with Atahualpa (d. 1533) secure upon the throne. With an army of about 50,000 men, Atahualpa was curious and somewhat scornful of a small band of foreigners marching through his territory, and decided to meet with them in person at Cajamarca. Arriving in November 1532, Pizarro planned to emulate Cortés, and capture the Inca emperor, with Spaniards hidden in buildings around the great square of Cajamarca. Atahualpa entered the square with an escort of 6,000 barely armed men with short clubs and slings; a battle was not expected. Pizarro sent out a priest who harangued the Incas for some time to accept Christianity, and then handed Atahualpa a Bible. Outraged at the lack of diplomatic curtsy, Atahualpa flung the book to the ground. At that point, the Spanish opened fire. The astonished Incas were cut-down from all sides, with Pizarro himself seizing Atahualpa and dragging him away. There followed the highest stakes hostage situation of all time. Atahualpa told Pizarro that in exchange for his freedom, he would fill the room they were in with gold, and twice over with silver. Atahualpa eventually delivered on his promise, but, having outlived his usefulness, Pizarro had the supposedly semi-divine Inca emperor publicly strangled to death before his stunned subjects. Meanwhile Pizarro had been reinforced with an extra 153 soldiers, for the march on Cuzco, where he installed the emperor’s young nephew, Manco Inca (d. 1544), on the throne as puppet. The ethnically diverse Inca Empire, barely a century old, crumbled quickly into Spanish dominance. Yet it took forty years to consolidate control. After two years, Manco Inca escaped Cuzco, fleeing into the mountains, where he organised a major rebellion involving coordinated sieges of Cusco and Lima. Over the next 10-month nearly 500 Spanish soldiers died, but both sieges failed. Manco Inca and his followers then retreated further into the rainforest, and waged an aggressive guerilla style campaign against the Spanish. But the population of Spanairds in Peru almost doubled with each passing year. The Inca states clung to life for 36-years after Manco's first rebellion, until eventually in 1572, his son and the last Inca emperor was captured and executed. Meanwhile, Peru was a province of extraordinary wealth. Inca gold and silver had come entirely from surface deposits, and the Spaniards soon established mines. The Potosí region alone, high in the Andes, was so rich in silver, that it eventually had almost 5,000 working mines, and was to be Europe’s main source of bullion for the next three centuries. The Spanish Treasure Fleets began to operate from 1566, which linked the Americas with Spain across the Atlantic; the fleets expanded to more than 50 vessels by the end of the century. The convoys were general purpose cargo fleets used for transporting a wide variety of items. The precious bullion, as well as gems, pearls, sugar, tobacco, and other agricultural good were transported from the Americas to the Spanish mainland. Spanish goods such as oil, wine, textiles, books, tools, and other manufactured goods went in the opposite direction. By 1571, Spain had established a presence in the Philippines, and the convoys were extended; spices and other luxuries were brought overland through Panama or Mexico, then on to Spain. It would not be long before these treasures became an attractive target for privateers from the rest of Europe. Portuguese Indian Ocean The destruction of whole civilizations was only the worst aspect of a European readiness to dominate. In the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese moved quickly to monopolize trade to the detriment of Muslim merchants, with something of the zeal and brutality of a Crusade. On the east coast of Africa, small Islamic states were forced to become vassals on humiliating terms, or face either direct control or outright destruction. Soon Arab merchantmen were being boarded, torturing and slaughtering their crews and passengers, looting their cargoes, and burning the ravaged hulks. One of the more notorious incidents was an attack on a Pilgrim ship returning from Mecca to Calicut in which 400 men, women and children were killed. The problem with such an aggressive strategy was that it risked turning the native peoples against them, but fortunately for the Portuguese they were able to successfully pit local leaders against one another. In India, the first Portuguese trading-post in Calicut was destroyed, and, after bombarding the city, they were still welcome by the rival port of Kochi, where they established and fortified the first permanent European settlement in India in 1503. Attacks against Muslims throughout the Indian Ocean soon provoked a response from the most powerful Islamic state in the region; Mamluk Egypt. Egypt built a fleet of modern warships at the port of Suez on the Red Sea, in alliance with the Ottoman Turks and Indian princes. The Venetians also secretly provided finance and ship-building skills, since Portugal's clear aim was to undercut Venice's profitable trade in eastern spices via the overland route. The victory of the more experienced Portuguese fleet at the resulting Battle of Diu (February 1509) was one of the most important battles in world naval history. It provided a unique window of opportunity to secure Portuguese hegemony over the India Ocean. In 1510, they seized control of Goa, which became their centre of operations for the next 450-years. In 1511, the Portuguese took Malacca, the crucial chock-point between India and the Far East. In 1512, a fort and factory was established on one of the Maluku Islands in Indonesia; known in the West as the Spice Islands because it was the single world source of nutmeg and cloves. 1513 saw both the first European visitor to reach China by sea arriving at Macau, and a reconnaissance of the Red Sea that stunned the Muslim world. Two years later, the Portuguese conquered the trading port of Hormuz at the head of the Persian Gulf. After this expansion became less aggressive, and a period of consolidation set in. Goa, Malacca, and Hormuz became command post from which all the merchant of the Indian Ocean were required to purchase licences. It was a trading monopoly, but not only one of trade with Europe; there was much business to be done as carriers between Asian countries. Persian carpets went to India, cloves from the Indonesia to China, copper and silver from Japan to China, Indian cloth to Burma and Thailand, all in European ships. The Portuguese and their successors found this a profitable source of income to offset Europe’s unfavourable balance of trade with Asia, whose inhabitants long wanted little from Europe except silver. Thus was European hegemony over the global trade begun, that would last 500 years until the rise of Japan in the early 20th-century. Category:Historical Periods